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  Kawash shook his head, as if Assam had misunderstood him. "I don't want you to reveal secrets. Besides, I can guess what the project is." This was a lie. "What bothers me is that Maraji has control of it."

  "Why?"

  "For your sake. I'm thinking of your career."

  "I'm not worried--"

  "Then you should be. Maraji wants your job, you must know that."

  The cafe proprietor brought a dish of olives and two flat loaves of pita bread. Kawash was silent until he went on. He watched Assam as the man's natural insecurity fed on the lie about Maraji.

  Kawash continued, "Maraji is reporting directly to the Minister, I gather."

  "I see all the documents, though," Assam said defensively.

  "You don't know what he is saying privately to the Minister. He is in a very strong position."

  Assam frowned. "How did you find out about the project, anyway?"

  Kawash leaned back against the cool concrete wall. "One of Maraji's men was doing a bodyguarding job in Cairo and realized he was being followed. The tail was an Israeli agent called Towfik. Maraji doesn't have any field men in the city, so the bodyguard's request for action was passed to me. I picked Towfik up."

  Assam snorted with disgust. "Bad enough to let himself be followed. Worse to call the wrong department for help. This is terrible."

  "Perhaps we can do something about it, my cousin."

  Assam scratched his nose with a hand heavy with rings. "Go on."

  "Tell the Director about Towfik. Say that Maraji, for all his considerable talents, makes mistakes in picking his men, because he is young and inexperienced by comparison with someone such as yourself. Insist that you should have charge of personnel for the Qattara project. Then put a man loyal to us into a job there."

  Assam nodded slowly. "I see."

  The taste of success was in Kawash's mouth. He leaned forward. "The Director will be grateful to you for having discovered this area of slackness in a top-security matter. And you will be able to keep track of everything Maraji does."

  "This is a very good plan," Assam said. "I will speak to the Director today. I'm grateful to you, cousin."

  Kawash had one more thing to say--the most important thing--and he wanted to say it at the best possible moment. It would wait a few minutes, he decided. He stood up and said, "Haven't you always been my patron?"

  They went arm-in-arm out into the heat of the city. Assam said, "And I will find a suitable man immediately."

  "Ah, yes," Kawash said, as if that reminded him of another small detail. "I have a man who would be ideal. He is intelligent, resourceful, and very discreet--and the son of my late wife's brother."

  Assam's eyes narrowed. "So he would report to you, too."

  Kawash looked hurt. "If this is too much for me to ask . . ." He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.

  "No," Assam said. "We have always helped one another."

  They reached the corner where they parted company. Kawash struggled to keep his feeling of triumph from showing in his face. "I will send the man to see you. You will find him completely reliable."

  "So be it," said Assam.

  Pierre Borg had known Nat Dickstein for twenty years. Back in 1948 Borg had been sure the boy was not agent material, despite that stroke with the boatload of rifles. He had been thin, pale, awkward, unprepossessing. But it had not been Borg's decision, and they had given Dickstein a trial. Borg had rapidly come to acknowledge that the kid might not look like much but he was smart as shit. He also had an odd charm that Borg never understood. Some of the women in the Mossad were crazy about him--while others, like Borg, failed to see the attraction. Dickstein showed no interest either way--his dossier said, "Sex life: none."

  Over the years Dickstein had grown in skill and confidence, and now Borg would rely on him more than any other agent. Indeed, if Dickstein had been more personally ambitious he could have had the job Borg now held.

  Nevertheless, Borg did not see how Dickstein could fulfill his brief. The result of the policy debate over nuclear weapons had been one of those asinine political compromises which bedeviled the work of all civil servants: they had agreed to steal the uranium only if it could be done in such a way that nobody would know, at least for many years, that Israel had been the thief. Borg had fought the decision--he had been all for a sudden, swift piece of buccaneering and to hell with the consequences. A more judicious view had prevailed in the Cabinet; but it was Borg and his team who had to put the decision into effect.

  There were other men in the Mossad who could carry out a prescribed scheme as well as Dickstein--Mike, the head of Special Operations, was one, and Borg himself was another. But there was nobody else to whom Borg could say, as he had said to Dickstein: This is the problem--go solve it.

  The two men spent a day in a Mossad safe house in the town of Ramat Gan, just outside Tel Aviv. Security-vetted Mossad employees made coffee, served meals, and patrolled the garden with revolvers under their jackets. In the morning Dickstein saw a young physics teacher from the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot. The scientist had long hair and a flowered tie, and he explained the chemistry of uranium, the nature of radioactivity and the working of an atomic pile with limpid clarity and endless patience. After lunch Dickstein talked to an administrator from Dimona about uranium mines, enrichment plants, fuel fabrication works, storage and transport; about safety rules and international regulations; and about the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Euratom.

  In the evening Borg and Dickstein had dinner together. Borg was on a halfhearted diet, as usual: he ate no bread with his skewered lamb and salad, but he drank most of the bottle of red Israeli wine. His excuse was that he was calming his nerves so that he would not reveal his anxiety to Dickstein.

  After dinner he gave Dickstein three keys. "There are spare identities for you in safety-deposit boxes in London, Brussels and Zurich," he said. "Passports, driving licenses, cash and a weapon in each. If you have to switch, leave the old documents in the box."

  Dickstein nodded. "Do I report to you or Mike?"

  Borg thought: You never report anyway, you bastard. He said, "To me, please. Whenever possible, call me direct and use the jargon. If you can't reach me, contact any embassy and use the code for a meeting--I'll try to get to you, wherever you are. As a last resort, send coded letters via the diplomatic bags."

  Dickstein nodded expressionlessly: all this was routine. Borg stared at him, trying to read his mind. How did he feel? Did he think he could do it? Did he have any ideas? Did he plan to go through the motions of trying it and then report that it was impossible? Was he really convinced the bomb was the right thing for Israel?

  Borg could have asked, but he would have got no answers.

  Dickstein said, "Presumably there's a deadline."

  "Yes, but we don't know what it is." Borg began to pick onions out of the remains of the salad. "We must have our bomb before the Egyptians get theirs. That means your uranium has to go on stream in the reactor before the Egyptian reactor goes operational. After that point, everything is chemistry--there's nothing either side can do to hurry subatomic particles. The first to start will be the first to finish."

  "We need an agent in Qattara," Dickstein said.

  "I'm working on it."

  Dickstein nodded. "We must have a very good man in Cairo."

  This was not what Borg wanted to talk about. "What are you trying to do, pump me for information?" he said crossly.

  "Thinking aloud."

  There was silence for a few moments. Borg crunched some more onions. At last he said, "I've told you what I want, but I've left to you all the decisions about how to get it."

  "Yes, you have, haven't you." Dickstein stood up. "I think I'll go to bed."

  "Have you got any idea where you're going to start?"

  Dickstein said, "Yes, I have. Goodnight."

  Chapter Three

  Nat
Dickstein never got used to being a secret agent. It was the continual deceit that bothered him. He was always lying to people, hiding, pretending to be someone he was not, surreptitiously following people and showing false documents to officials at airports. He never ceased to worry about being found out. He had a daytime nightmare in which he was surrounded suddenly by policemen who shouted, "You're a spy! You're a spy!" and took him off to prison where they broke his leg.

  He was uneasy now. He was at the Jean-Monnet building in Luxembourg, on the Kirchberg Plateau across a narrow river valley from the hilltop city. He sat in the entrance to the offices of the Euratom Safeguards Directorate, memorizing the faces of the employees as they arrived at work. He was waiting to see a press officer called Pfaffer but he had intentionally come much too early. He was looking for weakness. The disadvantage of this ploy was that all the staff got to see his face, too; but he had no time for subtle precautions.

  Pfaffer turned out to be an untidy young man with an expression of disapproval and a battered brown briefcase. Dickstein followed him into an equally untidy office and accepted his offer of coffee. They spoke French. Dickstein was accredited to the Paris office of an obscure journal called Science International. He told Pfaffer that it was his ambition to get a job on Scientific American.

  Pfaffer asked him, "Exactly what are you writing about at the moment?"

  "The article is called 'MUF.' " Dickstein explained in English, "Material Unaccounted For." He went on, "In the United States radioactive fuel is continually getting lost. Here in Europe, I'm told, there's an international system for keeping track of all such material."

  "Correct," Pfaffer said. "The member countries hand over control of fissile substances to Euratom. We have, first of all, a complete list of civilian establishments where stocks are held--from mines through preparation and fabrication plants, stores, and reactors, to reprocessing plants."

  "You said civilian establishments."

  "Yes. The military are outside our scope."

  "Go on." Dickstein was relieved to get Pfaffer talking before the press officer had a chance to realize how limited was Dickstein's knowledge of these subjects.

  "As an example," Pfaffer continued, "take a factory making fuel elements from ordinary yellowcake. The raw material coming into the factory is weighed and analyzed by Euratom inspectors. Their findings are programmed into the Euratom computer and checked against the information from the inspectors at the dispatching installation--in this case, probably a uranium mine. If there is a discrepancy between the quantity that left the dispatching installation and the quantity that arrived at the factory, the computer will say so. Similar measurements are made of the material leaving the factory--quantity and quality. These figures will in turn be checked against information supplied by inspectors at the premises where the fuel is to be used--a nuclear power station, probably. In addition, all waste at the factory is weighed and analyzed.

  "This process of inspection and double-checking is carried on up to and including the final disposal of radioactive wastes. Finally, stocktaking is done at least twice a year at the factory."

  "I see." Dickstein looked impressed and felt desperately discouraged. No doubt Pfaffer was exaggerating the efficiency of the system--but even if they made half the checks they were supposed to, how could anyone spirit away one hundred tons of yellowcake without their computers noticing? To keep Pfaffer talking, he said, "So, at any given moment your computer knows the location of every scrap of uranium in Europe."

  "Within the member countries--France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And it's not just uranium, it's all radioactive material."

  "What about details of transportation?"

  "All have to be approved by us."

  Dickstein closed his notebook. "It sounds like a good system. Can I see it in operation?"

  "That wouldn't be up to us. You'd have to contact the atomic energy authority in the member country and ask permission to visit an installation. Some of them do guided tours."

  "Can you let me have a list of phone numbers?"

  "Certainly." Pfaffer stood up and opened a filing cabinet.

  Dickstein had solved one problem only to be confronted with another. He had wanted to know where he could go to find out the location of stockpiles of radioactive material, and he now had the answer: Euratom's computer. But all the uranium the computer knew about was subject to the rigorous monitoring system, and therefore extremely difficult to steal. Sitting in the untidy little office, watching the smug Herr Pfaffer rummage through his old press releases, Dickstein thought: If only you knew what's in my mind, little bureaucrat, you'd have a blue fit; and he suppressed a grin and felt a little more cheerful.

  Pfaffer handed him a cyclostyled leaflet. Dickstein folded it and put it in his pocket. He said, "Thank you for your help."

  Pfaffer said, "Where are you staying?"

  "The Alfa, opposite the railway station."

  Pfaffer saw him to the door. "Enjoy Luxembourg."

  "I'll do my best," Dickstein said, and shook his hand.

  The memory thing was a trick. Dickstein had picked it up as a small child, sitting with his grandfather in a smelly room over a pie shop in the Mile End Road, struggling to recognize the strange characters of the Hebrew alphabet. The idea was to isolate one unique feature of the shape to be remembered and ignore everything else. Dickstein had done that with the faces of the Euratom staff.

  He waited outside the Jean-Monnet building in the late afternoon, watching people leave for home. Some of them interested him more than others. Secretaries, messengers and coffee-makers were no use to him, nor were senior administrators. He wanted the people in between: computer programmers, office managers, heads of small departments, personal assistants and assistant chiefs. He had given names to the likeliest ones, names which reminded him of their memorable feature: Diamante. Stiffcollar, Tony Curtis, Nonose, Snowhead, Zapata, Fatbum.

  Diamante was a plump woman in her late thirties without a wedding ring. Her name came from the crystal glitter on the rims of her spectacles. Dickstein followed her to the car park, where she squeezed herself into the driving seat of a white Fiat 500. Dickstein's rented Peugeot was parked nearby.

  She crossed the Pont-Adolphe, driving badly but slowly, and went about fifteen kilometers southeast, finishing up at a small village called Mondorf-les-Bains. She parked in the cobbled yard of a square Luxembourgeois house with a nail-studded door. She let herself in with a key.

  The village was a tourist attraction, with thermal springs. Dickstein slung a camera around his neck and wandered about, passing Diamante's house several times. On one pass he saw, through a window, Diamante serving a meal to an old woman.

  The baby Fiat stayed outside the house until after midnight, when Dickstein left.

  She had been a poor choice. She was a spinster living with her elderly mother, neither rich nor poor--the house was probably the mother's--and apparently without vices. If Dickstein had been a different kind of man he might have seduced her, but otherwise there was no way to get at her.

  He went back to his hotel disappointed and frustrated--unreasonably so, for he had made the best guess he could on the information he had. Nevertheless he felt he had spent a day skirting the problem and he was impatient to get to grips with it so he could stop worrying vaguely and start worrying specifically.

  He spent three more days getting nowhere. He drew blanks with Zapata, Fatbum and Tony Curtis.

  But Stiffcollar was perfect.

  He was about Dickstein's age, a slim, elegant man in a dark blue suit, plain blue tie, and white shirt with starched collar. His dark hair, a little longer than was usual for a man of his age, was graying over the ears. He wore handmade shoes.

  He walked from the office across the Alzette River and uphill into the old town. He went down a narrow cobbled street and entered an old terraced house. Two minutes later a light went on in an attic window.

  Dickstein hung around for
two hours.

  When Stiffcollar came out he was wearing close-fitting light trousers and an orange scarf around his neck. His hair was combed forward, making him look younger, and his walk was jaunty.

  Dickstein followed him to the Rue Dicks, where he ducked into an unlit doorway and disappeared. Dickstein stopped outside. The door was open but there was nothing to indicate what might be inside. A bare flight of stairs went down. After a moment, Dickstein heard faint music.

  Two young men in matching yellow jeans passed him and went in. One of them grinned back at him and said, "Yes, this is the place." Dickstein followed them down the stairs.

  It was an ordinary-looking nightclub with tables and chairs, a few booths, a small dance floor and a jazz trio in a corner. Dickstein paid an entrance fee and sat at a booth, within sight of Stiffcollar. He ordered beer.

  He had already guessed why the place had such a discreet air, and now, as he looked around, his theory was confirmed: it was a homosexual club. It was the first club of this kind he had been to, and he was mildly surprised to find it so unexceptionable. A few of the men wore light make-up, there were a couple of outrageous queens camping it up by the bar, and a very pretty girl was holding hands with an older woman in trousers; but most of the customers were dressed normally by the standards of peacock Europe, and there was no one in drag.

  Stiffcollar was sitting close to a fair-haired man in a maroon double-breasted jacket. Dickstein had no feelings about homosexuals as such. He was not offended when people supposed, wrongly, that he might be homosexual because he was a bachelor in his early forties. To him, Stiffcollar was just a man who worked at Euratom and had a guilty secret.

  He listened to the music and drank his beer. A waiter came across and said, "Are you on your own, dear?"

  Dickstein shook his head. "I'm waiting for my friend."

  A guitarist replaced the trio and began to sing vulgar folk songs in German. Dickstein missed most of the jokes, but the rest of the audience roared with laughter. After that several couples danced.

  Dickstein saw Stiffcollar put his hand on his companion's knee. He got up and walked across to their booth.

  "Hello," he said cheerfully, "didn't I see you at the Euratom office the other day?"